Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Against the need for speed, Malign Velocities tracks acceleration as the symptom of the ongoing crises of capitalism.

We are told our lives are too fast, subject to the accelerating demand that we innovate more, work more, enjoy more, produce more, and consume more. That’s one familiar story. Another, stranger, story is told here: of those who think we haven’t gone fast enough. Instead of rejecting the increasing tempo of capitalist production they argue that we should embrace and accelerate it. Rejecting this conclusion, "Malign Velocities" tracks this 'accelerationism' as the symptom of the misery and pain of labour under capitalism. Retracing a series of historical moments of accelerationism - the Italian Futurism; communist accelerationism after the Russian Revolution; the 'cyberpunk phuturism' of the ’90s and ’00s; the unconscious fantasies of our integration with machines; the apocalyptic accelerationism of the post-2008 moment of crisis; and the terminal moment of negative accelerationism - suggests the pleasures and pains of speed signal the need to disengage, negate, and develop a new politics that truly challenges the supposed pleasures of speed.

REVIEWS & ENDORSEMENTSAlways deterritorialize! Or so goes the mantra of recent "accelerationist" theory. Intoxication against intoxication, schizophrenia against schizophrenia, delirium against delirium--the accelerationist tendencies of millennial life are laid bare in this concise volume by the author who first suggested the term. From the historical avant-garde, through Detroit techno and science fiction, to Nick Land and the Cybernetic Cultures Research Unit (CCRU), Benjamin Noys reveals the ideological fantasies of speed. We should dismiss accelerationism for its capitalophilia, he concludes, but preserve it for its extremism: go far, go deep and go negative to get real. ~ Alexander R. Galloway

'The notion that 'the worse, the better' has an obvious appeal to disempowered communists in a time of capitalist crisis. Malign Velocities steps in and registers the futurist thrill of those theorists who would arrive at communism via an advanced, high tech capitalism - and registers the often disastrous results of these 'accelerations', which took us more often to Stalinism or neoliberalism than to utopia. Noys' writing is erudite, clear, and coloured by the darkest humour' ~ Owen Hatherley, author Militant Modernism, Zero Books 2009

In the midst of a hair-shirt neoliberalism, with growth-rates stagnating and accumulation reliant on ever-deeper dispossession, the sirens of speed are once again luring the advocates of radical theory. Malign Velocities diagnoses the moment of 'accelerationism' with exacting lucidity, revisiting prior iterations of the idea of an excessive exit from the clutches of capital – from futurism to cyberpunk – and uncovering these theories' political-economic unconscious, the accelerationist's fantasy of labour. Noys's book is a model of dialectical critique, combining a sophisticated account of accelerationism's historical conditions of possibility with an incisive verdict about its incapacity to generate strategies adequate to this conjuncture of crisis. Malign Velocities succeeds in both being true to the materialist injunction not to tell oneself stories and in weaving an engrossing tale of theory's struggles with the limits and compulsions of capitalism. ​ ~ Alberto Toscano, Reader in Critical Theory, Goldsmiths, and author of "Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea"

Not so fast Mr. Historian: “This, of course, is not the Eichmann of Hannah Arendt (“the world’s worst court reporter,” as I’ve described her), who credulously bought into his “poor schlub,” pen pusher trial defense — just following orders, moving things along deep within the bureaucracy......Functionalism [the idea that the Nazis simply exploited the Jews], going strong when I first wrote this book, has been cast into the dustbin of history along with ‘the banality of evil’.”That's so not what Arendt is talking about. She is describing how banality itself is evil, not a cover for evil. Banality depends upon a lack of anxiety, the basic affect, the emotion that never lies etc. Psychopaths offer extremely banal explanations for their behavior. Which is not in the last to say that they didn't sadistically enjoy it. Banalityis a form of sadistic enjoyment.

Just listen to anything by Throbbing Gristle, e.g almost anything on 20 Jazz Funk Greats, or the first track on the Second Annual Report. You will hear people talking blandly about absurd cruelty. Casually.

Hypostasizing “evil” as this smoking metaphysical lump of coal totally misses this, as the end of Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits makes quite clear.

Banal << “pertaining to compulsory feudal service” (OED). The enjoyment of being a component of a hierarchical machine. Casual. Slack. Just another day...

Wow, I'm looking at the try-out for this beautiful new book by Olafur Eliasson. It's photographs of land. That is such a flat description! How to put it into words. Very difficult. There is something unspeakable about it.

He has used my phrase Contact Is Content for the title. Well I said The contact becomes the content and he compressed it. I prefer the compressed version...always nice to be remixed...

The photographs exemplify this sentence, silently. Actually that's not quite right. The title exemplifies the silence of the images, and of the succession of images. There is something magical in their succession.

Well, the thing is, I did some talks that were adjunct to the Wellek Lectures. And I was waiting until those had been done and unveiled before I put the others together. You'll see that pieces of the Lectures are in those other talks.

Dark Ecology is such a nice project right now. Graham has been writing about politics a bit recently, and so am I, at this point. One has to give us a bit of a chance, you know. Hard to get everything together all at once, although if you read my stuff a bit you'll see it's quite strongly implicit, and sometimes explicit. It's called anarchy.

“The Republican response was predictable: a resounding “we told you so.” All along, they insisted that the ACA wouldn’t work, that it would raise costs — and when reality didn’t match with their scary stories, they took deliberate action to make the bad outcomes they fervently wished for more likely. In the case of the subsidies, which are helping real people get coverage, it took an extensive lawsuit, some friendly judges, and some twisted legal reasoning to undermine them.”(How different is that, really, in intent, from the idea from the opposite end of things that Obama should have pushed for national health and have it fail, so as not to compromise?)

“Deep, peaceful, perfectly pure,
luminous, uncompounded, and like nectar
is the Dharma I have obtained.
Even if I were to teach it,
it could not be known by another.
Certainly, I must remain silent in the forest.”

Cliff writes of that review: “It's kinda interesting that "hypocrisy, weakness and lameness" aren't taken seriously as a response to a global cataclysm. They're brushed aside in favor of some flavor of big science and big violence. These are the same sort of criticisms that Occupy faced, and yet they succeeded in changing the national dialogue on income inequality.”Aha. You see I didn't actually read it...I guess the only thing I'll say is that if I only had a dollar for every time someone asked, while I was presenting the hyperobjects, “what are we to do?”---a question whose implication was that I had gotten something terribly wrong...I used to say that hesitation and puzzlement are things to do. They are of course. But now I also “have” “a” “politics” that arises from thinking hyperobjects, so I can talk about that. I can only be thankful to thepeople of Iceland for these new things to say, which are a great help.

...you know you're on to something. Look how it phrases things: “Even if every person decided to sit down at the exact same time, there would still be an adequate number of chairs to go around,” Clouse added. “As far as chairs go, we’re basically set.”That's my line! Take a look at this. Marina Zurkow's new thing. I had to do the entry on plexiglass chairs! In case you haven't been following this, I'm a bit obsessed with chairs as they are a good way of thinking about how nonhuman nonsentient things have agency. A human is now a chair vector. After we go extinct there will be huge piles of chairs on whatever planets we have colonized. The first thing you design in Design 101 is...a chair. Making a chair comes from the age of agrilogistics. The conquering king sitting on his enemies etc. Then everyone had to have one: democracy! But they are no good for you. In effect they are literally a virus: an idea-virus and a chair-virus, and we seem hopelessly incapable to stop reproducing them.

Friday, July 11, 2014

The small humans and I have visited for the fifth time what Simon loves to call "Noodle Paradise," Soto's Houston Penetrable. Tactile colored space. Playful, immersive, disorienting. Highly recommended if you're anywhere near.

Someone asks where they are. Well, there are several classes in "Classes" (Romanticism) about it. And several places in my writing:

The final part of Hyperobjects.The Ecological Thought chapter 2.
“Coexistence without Coexistents” if you can find it.
Chapter 3 of The Poetics of Spice.
Throughout Ecology without Nature.
“Of Matter and Meter” if you can find it.Realist Magic.
“The Dark Ecology of Elegy.”
“Queer Ecology.”
“Twinkle Twinkle Little Star as an Ambient Poem.”
And elsewhere...

Someone wanted a brief-ish, simpl-ish explanation. The trouble with listening to explanations in talks is that it's hard to hold on to the concepts as they flit past. And in particular I tend to machine gun them out like some kind of mad scholar version of LTJ Bukem.

So:

An agricultural program so successful that it now dominates agricultural techniques planet-wide. It arose in the Fertile Crescent 12 000 years ago. Toxic from the beginning to humans and other lifeforms, and now responsible for a huge amount of global warming. It led to industry, the other huge global warming factor. Though toxic, it has been wildly successful, because the program is even more compelling than Candy Crush. It operates blindly, just like a computer program. It promises to eliminate anxiety and contradiction--social, physical and ontological--by establishing thin rigid boundaries between human and nonhuman worlds, and by reducing existence to sheer quantity. Agrilogistics is the smoking gun behind the (literally) smoking gun responsible for the Sixth Mass Extinction Event.

Stop. Exhibit A: “All this stems, this carbon capture, all this other stuff, it stems back to a scare, generated years ago about global warming,” the Fayette County lawmaker said on Thursday. “Finally it turned out there hasn’t been global warming in 15 or 20 years, then they changed the name to climate change.” Kentucky State Representative Stan Lee

Tuesday, July 8, 2014

This is a pretty neat one, from my essay “Ecology” from Imre Szeman's Fueling Culture, coming out soon.

When we divide the world into the categories nature and culture, we are performing the quintessential gesture of modernity. But modernity is predicated on the ecological emergency that has given rise to a totally new geological period: the Anthropocene. “Modernity” is how the Anthropocene has appeared to us historically thus far. Dividing the world into nature and culture is precisely anti-ecological, insofar as it participates in the logistics that enabled humans to act as a geophysical force on a planetary scale. The Anthropocene is also the moment at which Western philosophy decided to restrict itself to the (human) subject–world correlate (Meillassoux 2009: 5). This self-imposed blindness to the real seems to go hand in hand with the direct intervention in the geological real.

Weird that in the age of obsessive injunctions to have sex everywhere, the one thing taboo is your mind having sex with your mind.

Profound and tranquil, free from complexity,
Uncompounded luminous clarity,
Beyond the mind of conceptual ideas;
This is the depth of the mind of the Victorious Ones.
In this there is not a thing to be removed,
Nor anything that needs to be added.
It is merely the immaculate
Looking naturally at itself.
NYOSHUL KHEN RINPOCHE

Last year I posted the original “Sunhair” from my erstwhile friends the Ozric Tentacles. Now here is the System 7 edit, which sometimes I think is the best one. They nail the vastness of that opening riff by having keyboards and guitar double track it. And it's very bright here now. Ed now lives in Boulder I think. Awesome. Miss it a lot.

And as Neil on The Young Ones says, “Oh no! Steve Hillage!” But in a good way.

I say this a lot, and I said it in one of my books. No. Actually I said “contact becomes content,” but the very perceptive Olafur Eliasson has changed it to contact is content. And this has now become the title of a book of his landscape photographs of Iceland and some smaller artworks. It will be launched at the Louisiana exhibition Riverbedopening in August.

Working with him has been quite magical this last half a year.

Contact is content is also an OOO phrase. If you think of an object as what some call a medium, then you get there.

Ernst Haeckel not only coined the term ecology, he also coined First World War. Think about that one: somehow he figured it was the first. It's easy to do it when there have been two. Perhaps it comes from the kind of scalar imagination necessary for thinking ecology, also global.

Oh I don't know. But having listened to them since I was about 10 I feel that the one I can listen to every single day, which doesn't mean it's the best, is Animals. And I say this as the biggest fan of Syd who was so happy to hear “Rhamadan,” finally.

It's that song “Dogs” mostly. Sick parody of jazz funk and prog jazz from around that time. That mid section which is a keyboard solo (or electronic world, really), where dogs melt into human voices melting into the primordial slime, for some timeless time out of time. It's beyond Orwellian prosopopoeia. It's humans melding with nonhumans in an incomprehensible, nonconceptual way.

If you take the train from Sutton to Victoria you pass by the gigantic Battersea Power Station, but before you do that you pass through the lands of early drum and bass, where I used to live. Something about those siren-like sounds on “Dogs” and elsewhere on that album. Secret, melancholy London, side by side with the official one. Geniuses in tiny flats on their computers in 1992.

I don't ever read reviews of my stuff, at all! So when I hear about reviews, I sort of go "Dur, er, huh" like some kind of Scooby Doo with a Ph.D.

But I think I hear that some people are like “What on Earth does Morton think he's doing with his talk of relativity on one page and quantum theory on another? Everyone knows that they are totally different!”

Well, that's the whole trouble you see. Of course one “knows” they are different, people have horrifying trouble putting gravity together with the other three forces, etc. One has indeed put this fact in all one's books, so it's peculiar people don't see it. Or maybe don't want to see it?

There is a difference however between knowing and assuming.

What interests me is

1. The scientism of “knowing” (for sure) that these “scales” or “levels” are different. This isn't actually how science proceeds, which brings me to

2. Many, many younger physicists are questioning the classical–quantum boundary, discovering it to be neither thin nor rigid. Discovering boundaries to be neither thin nor rigid was Derrida's whole schtick so I really really like them for that. I think that's also my job.

So I really like the work of Aaron O'Connell, who has shown that you can put something massively bigger than regular expected things such a photons and subatomic particles (that people bang on about in pop science) into coherence--this thing is so massive you can see it with the naked eye. Go on, watch his TED talk about it but I recommend (as I did when it first came out, a long time before the talk) reading his actual piece in Nature.

Then there are Petr Horava and others, who talk about quantum gravity: there is a very good essay by him called “Quantum Gravity at a Lifschitz Point” which says that gravity is a kind of averaged-out emergent property of tiny things interacting, noticeable at bigger-than-electron scales. I'm not saying he's right. I'm saying it's very interesting.

Now as far as hyperobjects go, these sorts of thing are all analogies, not actually observed patterns in empirical data.

Yet since I hold that thin rigid boundaries are impossible, I take these sorts of physicists to be very very good. Not right--how could I evaluate that? But very congruent with how I see things. I think they might be right if my idea of objects is right. I take what they do as symptoms of what things are in general.

I think they're so good that I take Niels Bohr to be part of some kind of correlationist clampdown when he says “There is no quantum world.” Sure there is--you can see it with your naked eye at this point! How come that's “not classical”--how come weird stuff only happens below 10 to the minus 20 cm or whatever?

Before I was into OOO I was very into David Bohm. Still am. He was notoriously hounded for his view that entanglement might be ontological, not just an effect of measurement. Naturally he would have enjoyed O'Connell's work quite a lot, and the string theory chaps such as Raphael Bousso who also have...a holographic universe model!

Thursday, July 3, 2014

“This is how it works today: In an ostensible hunt for voter fraud, a Tea Party group, True the Vote, descends on a largely minority precinct and combs the registration records for the slightest misspelling or address error. It uses this information to challenge voters at the polls, and though almost every challenge is baseless, the arguments and delays frustrate those in line and reduce turnout.”

This is a nice video by an excellent scholar. He says he's “not convinced” by OOO (although to be into hyperobjects IS to be convinced by it!). But this seems awfully OOO to me! And quite unlike the speculative realism his future conference seems to be about. That kind eschews beauty as a “pathetic” accident of (human) sentience.

Wednesday, July 2, 2014

Argh! Sorry! I've been so incredibly busy that I've only published comments via email for a bit. Nick, I think this sorts out the issue--when I see the actual comments page, I see all your original comments, which I've now published. Oh dear.

I literally have about 90 minutes a day to work, or less, which means I have to get busy with my writing. It's weird I've been able to do all of it pretty much on time so far.

Which is ironic. This is one thing that the cultural Marxist journals and the GOP have in common. For them, global warming doesn't exist, merely in different ways. For the former, it's not a contemporary issue worth pursuing. For the latter, it's a liberal deception. I wonder what the difference in the net effect is, truly.

Beyond Sexism, Racism, Speciesism, We Are All the Same

I Wrote a Book with Björk

“A magical booklet of emails between Björk and philosopher Timothy Morton is a wild, wonderful conversation full of epiphanies and sympathies, incorporating Michael Jackson, daft goths and the vibration of subatomic particles in its dizzying leaps, alive with the thrill of falling in love with someone’s brain.” (Emily Mackay, NME)

New

AND

Timothy Morton

Timothy Morton is the author of Being Ecological (Penguin, 2018), Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (Verso, 2017), Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (Columbia, 2016), Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (Chicago, 2015), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minnesota, 2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Open Humanities, 2013), The Ecological Thought (Harvard, 2010), Ecology without Nature (Harvard, 2007), eight other books and 200 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, architecture, design and food. In 2014 Morton gave the Wellek Lectures in Theory. He is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. Email me

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Zermelo-Fraenkel Free Zone

“Outstanding.”—Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes

“Dark ecology has the potential to be the punk rock or experimental pop of ecological thinking.”—Kasino A4

“It isn’t [nature] itself that needs trashing — we’re doing a fine job of that already; it’s our way of thinking about it that needs to be structurally realigned ... it's an important book that, in a scant 205 pages of main text ... frames a debate that no doubt will be carried on for years to come.”—Vince Carducci, Pop Matters

“He practices what he theorizes: nothing is wasted in his argumentation.”—Emmanouil Aretoulakis, Synthesis

“Picking up where his most obvious predecessors, Gregory Bateson and Felix Guattari, left off, Morton understands mental ecology as the ground zero of ecological thinking, as that which must be redressed before anything else and above all. Morton goes beyond both his forebears, however, in repairing the rift between science and the humanities, which the Enlightenment opened up and against which Romanticism reacted. Perhaps most pleasantly surprising, given its erudition, is that in its stylistic elegance The Ecological Thought is as satisfying to read as it is necessary to ponder.”—Vince Carducci